Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Look Ahead With IBM To 2018
March 16, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe world today is a much different place from the one that the AS/400 was launched into nearly three decades ago. Back then, it was exotic to be moving from basic accounting systems running on batch oriented machines to real-time transaction processing and database querying using relational database technology. It was also a big deal to be moving away from homegrown software to packaged applications tailored to specific industries. Software is far more complex and so are the systems it runs across, and IBM reflects the complexity of the market it serves.
Ever since it nearly went bankrupt in the
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Reader Feedback On Affordable Energy: Investment In The IBM i ISV Community
March 9, 2015 Thanks for continuing to find new topics to stir conversations around the IBM i marketplace. I just read your story about IBM's ISV support programs and had a few thoughts to share.
… Read moreHi Dan:
Thanks for continuing to find new topics to stir conversations around the IBM i marketplace. I just read your story about IBM’s ISV support programs and had a few thoughts to share.
One of the challenges for ISVs who want to work in this market is that sometimes the strategies and development methods recommended by IBM are out of touch with the ISV’s market niche. You have to be careful not to follow IBM down a path that can lead you to create an application that IBM developers will praise, but very few customers will buy.
Another challenge
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IBM Discounts Let CPUs And Memory Go Mobile For Less
March 9, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWe have been noting in recent issues of The Four Hundred that Big Blue’s sales and marketing people in the United States and Canada have been quiet on the wheeling and dealing front in recent months, which is a bit peculiar seeing as though you would think that IBM, having exited the X86 system business, would be doing everything in its power to help push new iron to its Power Systems and System z installed base. The Power8 machines have been in the field since last year, and many of the customers and resellers we talk to say a
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Git To GitHub
March 3, 2015 Aaron Bartell
… Read moreIn my last article, the git tooling was introduced as a mechanism to track changes made to source code. This article expounds on that by showing how to make your local IFS git repository (“repo” for short) publicly available to others. I say “publicly” because that is the purpose of this article, though it could just as easily be applied to a situation where you wanted a private repo for a specific set of users (i.e., co-workers and/or consultants).
For the purposes of this article we will be walking through setting up a GitHub.com public repo. Note, GitHub has
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Case-Insensitive Searching Of Spooled Files
March 3, 2015 Ted Holt
… Read moreWe rely heavily on the DSPSPLF (Display Spooled File) command. We use it all day long, you and I, usually by selecting option 5 from various work-with displays. And yet this workhorse on which we depend suffers from a glaring deficiency–searching for text is case-sensitive. We expect case sensitivity from primitive operating systems like Unixsaurus, but not from the powerful IBM i. Here are a few ways to locate text in spooled files regardless of case.
First is the modern–and in my opinion, the best–way: IBM Navigator for i, the browser application that replaces System i Navigator. This app runs
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Old Stuff, New Ways: Avoiding Record Locks
March 3, 2015 Jon Paris
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
Recently I was teaching a group of RPGers the joys of qualified data structures. I happened to mention how much simpler some of the new DS capabilities had made the techniques I use to avoid problems caused by record locks. It turned out that more than half of the audience had never heard of the technique. I guess that we all have a tendency to think that the techniques and tools that we use are common knowledge amongst other programmers. As an educator I should perhaps be less
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IBM Boosts Capacity On FlashSystem Arrays
March 2, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you are looking to shop for all-flash storage systems to attach to your IBM i or other systems in the datacenter, you might want to take a gander at the new FlashSystem arrays that Big Blue launched last week. IBM has partnered with memory manufacturer Micron Technology and moved from the enterprise multi-layer cell (eMLC) memory used in the FlashSystem 840 and V840 machines to more capacious and presumably less expensive NAND MLC memory in the new Flash System 900 and V9000 machines launched last week.
From the looks of things, the basic feeds and speeds of the FlashSystem
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Sundry Power Systems Withdrawals, New I/O Tweaks
March 2, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt is a bit quiet out there in Power Systems land, but IBM is getting its house in order and making a few changes as it moves solidly into the Power8 era and puts older systems out to pasture. IBM also announced a few minor upgrades to the networking and virtualization features in the Power Systems line last week, and withdrew a key piece of WebSphere software from its catalog that might affect IBM i shops.
Let’s go over the tweaks to the Power Systems line first, which were detailed in announcement letter 115-043. IBM is partially fulfilling its
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Power Systems Maintenance Prices Hike In Canada. . . Vaulting Service Replaces Mirroring For IBM i Shop. . . Power Systems Academic Initiative Tops 300 Schools
February 23, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read morePower Systems Maintenance Prices Hike In Canada
by Timothy Prickett Morgan
Maintenance and support is an important part of any IT vendor’s revenue and profit streams and these services are also what make IT shops more or less comfortable with using a piece of hardware or software for mission-critical work. And generally speaking, maintenance prices tend to rise over time because the cost of people tends to go up, too.
In IBM’s fourth quarter, maintenance services represented about 12 percent of the $13.5 billion in Global Services revenues, or about $1.6 billion, taking a 9 percent hit as IBM divested
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Experimental Node.js Chatserver For IBM i
February 23, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreRainer Ross, the intrepid IBM i developer that we profiled in The Four Hundred a few weeks ago because he had developed a hotel search engine that mashed up the IBM i platform with Big Blue’s Watson cognitive analytics software, has another project he has been working on. And Ross wants to get the word out that all of us need to work to get more applications running on the Power Systems-IBM i combination to ensure the longevity of the platform.
First, here is his sense of what we have to do to broaden the appeal of IBM i.